With Icahn gone, investors now can appreciate eBay

MarekFuchs

When eBay reports first-quarter earnings today, the media’s coverage will no longer come with a suffix: Carl Icahn.

Icahn, the corporate raider, sometime prodder, sometime undercuttter and full-time tweeter, is, for the foreseeable future, disgorged from the company he has haunted of late.

Nothing shapes media perception like a good fight, especially when it gets personal. Icahn famously lobbed accusations of malfeasance at board members. Now, though, as Icahn sits in temporary repose, the public is in for a considerable change in what they read, hear and watch about eBay
EBAY, -0.42%

The thrill of the fight will be gone. What will stand in its place?

The media simply declared an end to the vitriol. For their part, Icahn and eBay kissed and made up in the way modern corporate lovers do — all over Twitter and CNBC.

Icahn tweeted that the declared truce was “a win-win for ALL shareholders.” (The caps are his — thankfully he spared us emoticons.) Meanwhile, over on CNBC, John Donahoe, the chief executive officer of eBay, echoed Icahn’s winning sentiment: “We found a way to make this a win-win instead of a zero-sum game,” he cooed.

Why are apprenticeships in decline?

(4:31)

When those in power trumpet their own good fortune, there is often reason to be wary. But in a certain sense, Icahn and Donahoe just might be right. The hair-pulling nature of the fight helped no one. Icahn, never prone to understatement, at one point even termed eBay one of the worst-run companies he had ever seen. Ouch. Plus, uh, really? Not for nothing, but eBay was all but discarded in the ash bin of Internet history until Donahoe came along. Now profits and revenue are growing again.

In fact, in an era of overrated and overpaid CEO’s, Donahoe might be one of the few — along with Howard Schultz from Starbucks
SBUX, -1.33%
(SBUX), Ford’s
F, -0.12%
Alan Mulally and Reed Hastings of Netflix
NFLX, -1.39%
(NFLX) — who is worth a decent fraction of what they get paid. Obviously: Donahoe has not yet taken his place in the pantheon with these CEOs quite yet. But with Icahn’s ridiculously demeaning public bleating out of the way, perhaps investors can get a clearer sense of Donahoe’s impressive set of talents and accomplishments.

About Icahn standing out of the way: Perhaps the high-powered gadfly will simply shuffle off to Apple
AAPL, -1.54%
where he has already helped manage to get the company to do another massive buyback, pay a bigger dividend and partake in empty financial gestures like stock splits, the likes of which General Electric
GE, -1.23%
and IBM
IBM, -1.33%
might embrace. Or maybe he will seek fortune and glory by kicking an altogether new company in the shins. But here’s the deal: There are no assurances that he is unhitched from eBay for good. The terms of the truce are vague and wooly, and Icahn is hardly known as the retiring kind. Stay vigilant.

For the time being, though, earnings season in the technology sphere has been convoluted, to say the least. While Google
GOOG, -0.73%
and IBM disappointed, Microsoft
MSFT, -0.74%
Apple, Facebook
FB, -1.18%
and Amazon
AMZN, -0.66%
all beat earnings estimates, but saw their stocks curdle.

A “beat” at eBay, unburdened with the complicated story line that was Icahn, might give final credence to the fact that technology stocks have, by and large, had a decent quarter. The same story could never be told with Icahn lurking about as a living, breathing addendum to each and every earnings release. A mere three sentences into reporting that eBay beat expectations in their fourth quarter, reported in January, MarketWatch said:

“EBay also said Carl Icahn is demanding that it spin off PayPal into a separate company. Icahn holds a 0.8% interest in eBay.”

And never mind the numbers. Often anything about eBay failed to make the headlines, in favor of Icahn.

The numbers will get play this go around. Analysts surveyed by FactSet have forecast eBay to earn 67 cents a share, excluding one-time items, up from 63 cents a year earlier. EBay itself has forecast earnings in a range of 65 cents to 67 cents.

Without any adversarial souls poking each other in the eyes, the stock market just might come to see eBay’s numbers as the fine sight they have been for quite some time.

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